Putin's Motives for Going into Ukraine:
An Analysis of His Essay "The Historical Unity of the Russian People"
I highly recommend reading Putin’s essay, "The Historical Unity of the Russian People." Whichever side you take on the current conflict, the piece offers fascinating insights into Putin’s motivations.
Before I dive into the text, I would draw people’s attentions to the title of the essay: It is not titled “The Security Concerns of the Russian State.”
Some lessons I take from the essay:
1) Putin seems to hold the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in utter contempt. (The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is the second most free nation in history after the United States of America and my second favorite country after the United States; if you don't love it already you will once you learn about the liberum veto). He sees Poland as a corrupting influence on Ukraine. This is good news as it suggests that Poland is not on his list of states he wishes to reincorporate into a "greater Russia."
He also villainizes Austria-Hungary, though to a lesser degree, and portrays Ukrainian nationalists as being "supported by Austria-Hungary."
So, the mainstream view of Putin is, at least, slightly wrong: It is not the Soviet Union Putin wishes to rebuild but the Russia of Czar Nicolas II.
2) Indeed, he seems to place a great deal of weight on the presence of the Orthodox Russian Church when defining what constitutes "historically Russian territory" , strongly suggesting that Orthodox areas are the ones on the list for reincorporation.
3) One can sense a strong anti-Catholic bias in the work. One of the PLC's crimes is giving "privileges to Catholic nobles."
4) He places a lot of weight on etymology: One of his arguments for Ukraine being Russian is that it has its origin---according to him, I have to verify whether Putin's claim is true---from the old Russian word for "borderland."
5) He interestingly substitutes the word "malorussian" for Ukrainian throughout the text, but only after establishing the meaning of the word---suggesting that most readers would be confused by it without the explanation. As most of Putin's readers would be native Russian speakers, this is quite interesting. Putin is playing word games. He is careful to return to the use of the term Ukrainian when referring to the Soviet Republic and when referring to its current "Nazi" government.
6) He lists three reasons for unity: A) Shared faith, B) Shared religion, C) Shared language, D) Shared literary heritage.
He cites literary figures who used both Ukrainian and Russian as evidence that Ukrainian is a mere Russian dialect as another reason for unity. I can say I am glad the English do not think the way Putin does or the US would be on the chopping block---at least, we would if Americans created better literature than we do.
7) He specifically refers to the provision of the 1924 USSR Constitution that allowed constituent republics to secede as a "time bomb."
8] He describes Russia as having been "robbed by the Bolsheviks." He disparages not their economic system but its internationalism. Of course, I despise all aspects of Marxism---so I will not chide him for hating this one point.
9) He puts forward a unique, and likely unsubstantiated legal principle: If you secede from the Soviet Union, you must return to the boundaries you had when you entered. "Take what you brought with you." Clearly, this principal is put forward because of how much it favors Russia---and there is nothing in the USSR Constitution that supports it.
10) After making a number of historical arguments, he then makes irredentist arguments on economic grounds. A good portion of the text is devoted to arguing that reunification would make Ukraine richer.
11) He is careful to distinguish between the "crimes of the Ukrainian authorities" and the "Ukrainian people."
12) He refers to the Holodomor as a "collective tragedy of collectivization and famine" strongly implying that it hurt Russians as much as it did Ukrainians, though this is manifestly untrue.
13) His reference to the UN estimates of victims in the Donbas conflict is interesting---as it does not distinguish between the separatists victims and those of the Ukrainian army. It would by as if Lincoln or Jefferson Davis talked about the horrors of the Civil War as justification for more civil war by citing the total deaths for both sides.
14) He concludes with remarks arguing that an independent Ukraine is unacceptable.
It is safe to conclude that Putin's real goals are to crush Ukrainian independence and Ukrainian nationalism---he would have accepted a separate Ukrainian state only if it resembled Belarus in its subservience to Moscow. I do not want to argue that NATO expansion was wise---as it likely played a role in garnering political support for Putin's current move---but only that it is not Putin was not solely, or even primarily, motivated by security concerns. His revanchism is undeniable.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181?fbclid=IwAR21_pLXJ9bxXY1wtv2k6FB3WwavccONkAT_6UmmbUCtaw31XDt4wnY_e-s
Thanks for this recommendation -- I've just read Putin's (or his ghostwriter's) essay.
He summarizes his mental picture of what he wants at the end: "We respect the Ukrainian language and traditions. We respect Ukrainians' desire to see their country free, safe and prosperous. I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia." He then offers as his reason for wanting this partnership "[o]ur spiritual, human and civilizational ties formed for centuries."
So, he sees Ukraine as one thing and Russian as another thing. Why then would he give his essay the title "The historical unity of the RUSSIAN people"? This title suggests that he sees "Russians" in the sense of Russian-speakers as the core of a kind of Greater Russia that includes Ukrainian-speakers and Belarussian-speakers along with Russian-speakers within itself, and that he pictures Russian-speakers as the senior partners in this "partnership" that he envisions.
Well, I guess there's nothing evil about that. After all, Anglophones are the senior organ of the Western organism. But Ukrainian-speakers are evidently intensely opposed to the idea of their becoming the junior members of a Greater Russian partnership.
Someone in the comments at Americangreatness or Breitbart today compared Putin to Abraham Lincoln. But Lincoln wasn't content with partnership between a senior North and a junior South; he wanted to reincorporate the Confederacy into the Union -- so I guess he was more radical than Putin is.